Thursday, May 22, 2008

Today I have actual knitting to show! Can you believe it??!! This is all (mostly) for a commission I received from a former coworker, whose best friend is due to have a baby in the next couple weeks.

First, a hat and sock set, made with 45% cotton/40% wool/15% nylon yarn, held double (gauge=6 stitches per inch).

One strand of yarn was plain white, and the other was Sockotta color 6655, which is a truly hideous colorway. Aqua, tan, beige, and yellowish green, in a striping and faux-fairisle pattern. Ick. The request for this set was yellow and green, though, and a quick trip through a pale yellow dyebath salvaged the yarn nicely, plus holding the ugly yarn with the plain white broke up the color pattern well. The aqua turned into a nice teal green.

Next up is another hat, the prototype for the second hat and sock set.

This is Knitpicks Bare DK merino, hand dyed by me (gauge=5.5 stitches per inch). Actually, it's the leftovers from Emma's hat and my hat. The two types of rainbow yarn did not have exactly the same colors in them- my yarn had the red more burgundy and the yellow more orange, and the color sections were also longer. Combining the two yarns by alternating yarns each row, however, looks great. This hat will be going into my shop tomorrow. Hey, it's coming up on winter in the southern hemisphere, right?

Since the pattern came out OK, I dyed up the yarn for the second hat and socks set, and knit merrily away after adjusting the number of stitches for a slightly smaller gauge.

The yarn is Knitpicks Bare 75% Superwash Merino/25% Nylon sock yarn, dyed by me of course. I also held the yarn double for this set (gauge= 6 stitches per inch). The interesting thing is that I knit from both ends of the ball, making no effort to match up the colors, and it still made a cool spiraled stripe around the body of the hat. It just happened that blue mostly matched up to blue and yellow mostly matched up to yellow in the double-stranded yarn. Since the colors weren't exactly matched, it gave a nice heathered effect instead of stark, discrete color changes.

I knit the entire rainbow set yesterday, and the yellow set Sunday and Monday. Baby stuff goes so fast! (The cotton yarn slowed me down a little, and made my hands hurt, so that set took two days.)

Emma has requested socks from the leftovers of this yarn, so it'll be interesting to see what it looks like knit as a single strand.